School Supply Socialism

Thursday, August 25th, 2011

Put this up on the Hello Kitty of Blogging because I was hoping I could do what Armstrong & Getty are doing, on a smaller scale, and find out how much & how often this is going on among my personal acquaintances…

But it occurs to me it’s probably just as good to bounce it off my “blog peeps” as well. It seems to be a national problem. From here in the Golden State, ya know, it’s kind of hard to tell.

It starts with something the radio dudes opened up…quoting from my page (Fb subscription required):

Jack and Joe are taking phone calls right now about school classrooms forcibly redistributing school supplies so one kid doesn’t feel bad about another kid having better stuff. Rather shocking how many teachers & parents are calling in with this blase attitude of “Oh yeah, you can’t have order in the classroom otherwise…” WTF??

Here, let’s list out the problems one by one. One: It’s communism. If you think it isn’t then your definition of communism is too narrow to work because you’re waiting for Che Guevara and Leon Trotsky to come back from the dead before you see any communists.

Two: When I was a kid, if a crayon fell on the floor it didn’t cause commotion. If it did, they removed the kid that caused the commotion and made sure he wouldn’t do it again.

Three: This seems to be going on in quite a few places — I was previously made to understand it hardly goes on anywhere. One caller said it would only take one lawsuit to bring it to a stop, and Jack commented well nobody wants to be that parent. Funny: When the time comes to sue the school for saying “under God” in the pledge, a LOT of parents want to be that parent.

And four: You know what? Real life doesn’t work that way. You don’t get to say “Hey he has something I don’t have, now I feel bad” and hope someone brings it to you. Well…not until a couple years ago…

What everyone seems to be letting go on this thing is: From all I’ve been able to tell about it so far, the one thing all of the reports have in common is that everywhere this is going on, there has been some kind of opaqueness to it. The creepy-crawly slithery-squirmy stuff is proliferating and thriving in the dark. It’s good old “Thou Shalt Not Covet” commandment-breaking jealousy…along with all of the inevitable miseries cropping up around it that must’ve inspired the Commandment in the first place. When the rock is uplifted and the light streams in, the critters scurry. Light, plainly and clearly, is the answer. And yet the push is on to keep the place dark. Don’t tell anyone. Yeah, I’ve been seizing your kids’ stuff, what’s your problem? Pipe down, shut up, go away, we’re doing what we need to do to keep order in the class.

I’m liking Jack Armstrong’s attitude: “You’re not taking my kid’s stuff, not gonna happen, listen to me carefully here: It isn’t going to happen.” That’s the right attitude. We need more of that.

I’ve already done my bit — had the conversation with my kid years ago, last time I heard about it. We’ve not had our experience with it just yet. But that’s us. What’s happening with everybody else?

You know, I’m not surprised. When it comes to “education,” we’re all conditioned communists anyway.
Think about it. It’s so common, it’s a cliched joke: parents celebrating the return of school.
THINK about that… supposedly sane parents celebrating the fact that they are about to turn their precious flesh and blood over to a government bureaucracy for 9 months of socialist indoctrination, prison-yard peer-pressure terror, and dismal, substandard education deliberately geared to make them into useful idiots, factory cogs and cannon fodder.

The first and most important approach to a solution is to see things as they are, no matter how unpleasant. Public schools are not reformable; they are in fact doing exactly what they should be predicted to be doing. Their masters are not the “public”, but government, and government will raise children in its own interests. Only private schools are mastered by a public, and even there the state is ever present.

The solution is seen in Chile and in the unhappy little country of Belgium. Absolute choice, and vouchers.